![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Well, that was better than expected
Apr. 18th, 2022 05:35 pmMinicon 55 has happened, and despite widespread apprehension and uncertainty it went just fine. Maybe not the biggest ball of fire in the Minicon Universe, but a perfectly nice little con. Anybody remember the Reinconation era of fallcons? A series of larger and more ambitious fall conventions in the... 90s (?). It felt a lot like one of those. And that's a standard that no con runners need to be ashamed of achieving.
One of the many challenges of this convention was trying to guess how many attendees there would be. We had 435 prereg, but as most of those were from 2019 it was no surprise that more than 25% of them were no-shows. But about 50 people turned up at the door and in the end we had 362 warm bodies: a pretty respectable number for a year of pestilence and doom and concom entropy.
I had a good time. I wasn't in charge of ANYTHING this year, which was lovely. I wandered around sticking my nose into various departmental business and doing odd jobs like deploying Programming room signs and fetching ice for the consuite. Filled in as a last-minute panelist on a low-stakes panel about SF Television which got a bigger audience than I expected (12, I think. I didn't say a LARGE audience, just more than I expected in a Friday timeslot competing with 2 other panels and a concert). Contributed to a display of hand-crafted COVID masks (which I imagine was of interest only to other mask makers but as a mask maker I enjoyed the display).
But mostly I just hung out and talked to people: at the Table Fort, in the Green Room, in the Bar, in the hallways. I imagine I finished in the top 5 at perpetuating the Minnesota Long Goodbye. In the end, serendipitous one-on-one conversations are usually the high points I remember after a con, so I call it a success.
Oh, and I fended off an assassination attempt, a historical first for Minnstf. My philosophy was: sure, our presidential succession traditionally involves an assassination attempt, but who says it has to be a successful assassination? One of the con chairs pulled a nerf gun on me at Closing Ceremonies, but at the end of the day the con chair lay dead and your President for Life continues on! Take that, Mister Big Deal Con Chair! Ha! Minicons come and go, but Minnstf abides. Fortunately a volunteer to chair Minicon 56 spontaneously emerged from the crowd after the tragedy, so Minicon will continue next year. The Chair is dead; long live The Chair!
One of the many challenges of this convention was trying to guess how many attendees there would be. We had 435 prereg, but as most of those were from 2019 it was no surprise that more than 25% of them were no-shows. But about 50 people turned up at the door and in the end we had 362 warm bodies: a pretty respectable number for a year of pestilence and doom and concom entropy.
I had a good time. I wasn't in charge of ANYTHING this year, which was lovely. I wandered around sticking my nose into various departmental business and doing odd jobs like deploying Programming room signs and fetching ice for the consuite. Filled in as a last-minute panelist on a low-stakes panel about SF Television which got a bigger audience than I expected (12, I think. I didn't say a LARGE audience, just more than I expected in a Friday timeslot competing with 2 other panels and a concert). Contributed to a display of hand-crafted COVID masks (which I imagine was of interest only to other mask makers but as a mask maker I enjoyed the display).
But mostly I just hung out and talked to people: at the Table Fort, in the Green Room, in the Bar, in the hallways. I imagine I finished in the top 5 at perpetuating the Minnesota Long Goodbye. In the end, serendipitous one-on-one conversations are usually the high points I remember after a con, so I call it a success.
Oh, and I fended off an assassination attempt, a historical first for Minnstf. My philosophy was: sure, our presidential succession traditionally involves an assassination attempt, but who says it has to be a successful assassination? One of the con chairs pulled a nerf gun on me at Closing Ceremonies, but at the end of the day the con chair lay dead and your President for Life continues on! Take that, Mister Big Deal Con Chair! Ha! Minicons come and go, but Minnstf abides. Fortunately a volunteer to chair Minicon 56 spontaneously emerged from the crowd after the tragedy, so Minicon will continue next year. The Chair is dead; long live The Chair!
